The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ from it, that he came to see his devotion to philosophy as the old enthusiasm in another form.

      By the time he had recast the first book of the Treatise of Human Nature, eight years after it was published, he was ready to take leave of the philosophical mood altogether. He now modestly offered the world merely Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding. The earlier work, “which pretended to innovate in all the sublimest parts of philosophy,” was, he declared, “a mistake in conduct.” “The positive air which prevails in that book, and which may be imputed to the ardour of youth, so much displeases me, that I have not the patience to review it.”¹ Hume, the man of moderation, was ready to take over. The Kirk’s influence had ready been undone, for he had come to accept the “whimsical condition of mankind.”

      The dispute between the dogmatists and the sceptics no longer seemed so profound. They disagreed really, he declared, only on the degrees of doubt and assurance that it is proper to indulge in:

      No philosophical Dogmatist denies that there are difficulties both with regard to the senses and to all science; and that these difficulties are in a regular, logical method, absolutely insolvable. No sceptic denies that we lie under an absolute necessity, notwithstanding these difficulties, of thinking, and believing, and reasoning with regard to all kind of subjects, and even of frequently assenting with confidence and security.

      The difference was only one of emphasis—“The Sceptic, from habit, caprice, or inclination insists most on difficulties; the Dogmatist, for like reasons, on the necessity.”¹ The problems of the sceptical philosopher were not unique to him, and what he taught was not all that extraordinary. He, too, was a dreamer, and when he awoke, he would be

      the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; tho they are not able by their most diligent inquiry to satisfy themselves concerning the foundations of these operations, or to remove the objections which may be raised against them.²

      Hume had learned to ridicule even his own pretensions. More and more, he came to hold the sentiments he expressed to a friend before leaving with General St. Clair’s expedition: “I set out next week, as fully convinced as Seneca of the vanity of the world, and the insufficiency of riches to render us happy. I wish you had a little more of the philosophy of that great man, and I a little more of his riches.”³

      In the Enquiries, he described philosophy not as the science of human nature, but as “the reflections of common life methodized and corrected.”⁴ Instead of displaying his confidence in the revolutionary truths that the experimental method would establish, he indulged in concessions to the “easy philosophy,” which any educated man could understand and read, and he disparaged “the mere philosopher” who “lives remote from communication with mankind and is wrapped up in principles and notions equally remote from their comprehension.” The most perfect character lay “between the two extremes of the mere ignorant and the mere philosphere.”⁵ He was critical of moralists who tried to reduce human phenomena to a single principle. His own aspirations had become much more humble—to enlarge the stock of knowledge “on subjects of unspeakable importance.” He would be happy if, “reasoning in this easy manner,” he could undermine “the foundations of an abstruse philosophy, which seems to have hitherto served only as a shelter to superstition, and a cover to absurdity and error.”¹

      Sceptical philosophy, he came to think, was not the whole truth, but in a more modest way useful. A small tincture of scepticism could soften the pride of men, by showing them that the few advantages they “have attained over their fellows, are but inconsiderable, if compared with the universal perplexity and confusion, which is inherent in human nature.” Philosophy was not so much a revelation as a means of tempering the boldness of men. The greater part of mankind, who “are apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions,” and eager to escape from any hestitation or perplexity, tend to oppose one belief by violent affirmations to the contrary. But reflection on the infirmities of the human mind might “inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists.”²

      Hume became less interested in metaphysical intricacies, and more anxious to press the moral of his philosophy, that the human condition allowed for no absolute purity, that men had better resign themselves to a measure of uncertainty and confusion, and a mixture of good and evil, true and false. All that he wrote after the Treatise was animated by the sentiment with which he ended his History of Natural Religion:

      … good and ill are universally intermingled and confounded: happiness and misery, wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Nothing is pure and entirely of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. An universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence. And it is not possible for us, by our most chimerical wishes to form the idea of a station or situation altogether desirable. The draughts of life, according to the poet’s fiction, are always mixed from the vessels of each hand of Jupiter: Or if any cup be presented altogether pure, it is drawn only, as the same poet tells us, from the left-handed vessel.

      The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded to us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature. The most sprightly wit borders on madness, the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy, the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust, the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments. And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains as far as possible, a mediocrity, a kind of insensibility in everything.¹

      It was only natural that the author of such a statement should have ceased to write systematic treatises and turned his efforts to essays and history, so much better suited to saying that “nothing is pure and entirely of a piece.”

      Hume’s retirement from philosophy strikes us as odd today partly because we no longer know the literary man, in the eighteenth-century sense, who took all of knowledge for his province and felt no obligation to devote himself exclusively to one. But it is also because we know of no other philosopher who was both so completely enthralled by the philosophical mood and so able to free himself from it. Those who have called Hume a sceptical philosopher have described inaccurately something they sensed—his distrust of all systems, hence of philosophy. He was not sceptical about the existence of the external world, or about man’s capacity for knowing something about it, but he was sceptical about man’s ability to make all his notions coherent and consistent, or to perceive a permanent truth. While driven by his puritanical habits to make a systematic truth of his doubts, his essential purpose, though not yet evident to himself, showed through. It led his readers to feel, though they could not properly explain it, a destructive spirit. Perhaps there cannot be a philosophical system compatible with Hume’s view of man—it may be no accident that systematic philosophy as we know it in the western world began with Plato, who first described man as a compound being. Any conception of man as one cannot perhaps be accounted for by philosophy, but only displayed in essays or history, aphorisms, poetry, or novels. In any case, Hume was the rare philosopher who remembered that there were more things in heaven and earth than philosophers dreamt of. He undermined philosophy with her own weapons, and then found even that not enough.

CHAPTER 7

       A Matter of Degree

      What Hume was really СКАЧАТЬ